Tony O’Neill, expert gardener and best-selling author of the famous “Simplify Vegetable Gardening,” “Composting Masterclass,” and “Your First Vegetable Garden,” combines lifelong passion and expert knowledge to simplify gardening. His mission? Helping you cultivate a thriving garden. More on Tony O’Neill
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You need four elements in your garden (food, shelter, water, and a place to breed) to attract nature and wildlife. And if you have a small garden, providing them even a couple of these elements, if not all, can help your garden thrive.
Here are some fantastic ways to integrate these elements into your garden seamlessly and bring your garden to life. You can try one or all of them to enjoy the magical experience of attracting nature to your garden.
1. Changes in Gardening Practices can attract nature into your garden
Changing a few of your gardening practices or introducing new ones can create a social space for wildlife in your garden.
- Grow a mix of shrubs, trees, or climbers to offer food and nesting sites to wildlife. Consider growing rowan, elder, crab apple, blackthorn, and hawthorn, as they are great for blossoms and berries.
- Avoiding chemical pesticides as they may kill beneficial insects. You can try natural ways to control pests and even make your compost so that you do not require chemical fertilizers.
- Consider planting flowers like marigolds, poached egg plants, calendula, and daisies to attract animals and insects that eat away pests.
If your garden is too small and growing trees is not viable, you can get a few planted in the neighborhood.
Moreover, within your garden, you can offer toads and hedgehogs habitat and hibernation spots as they can help you keep a check on slugs. Also, hoverflies, lacewings, and ladybirds will eat away insect pests.
2. Build dedicated habitats to attract nature into your garden
Different animals need different types of shelter and habitats. They can use it either for nesting or hiding from predators. And building habitats for them can help you attract nature to your garden.
You can try putting out nesting boxes or bird feeders that encourage birds to choose your backyard as their home, with branches of small trees and shrubs as great spots for nesting boxes.
In the next part, we shall talk about plants you can consider growing to encourage animals and select insects to visit your garden.
What to plant in dedicated habitats to attract nature into your garden
You can also consider hedges as they offer animals some extra nesting space. Plants like hazel, blackthorn, cherry plum, buckthorn, hawthorn, elder, and privet can be utilized for this purpose.
Creating a butterfly garden is also a marvelous way to encourage butterflies to visit your garden and help pollinate it. Consider growing various nectar-rich plants like grevilleas, lomandras, pimeleas, and flax lilies.
Making sure that your pets and the wildlife are well-adjusted in your garden
While building some exclusive wildlife spaces, you also check your pet animals.
If you have pets, you should consider keeping them indoors or leashed to ensure you create a wildlife-friendly area in your garden rather than scaring them away.
You can even allot different sections by putting up fences so that both – domestic and wild animals can enjoy your garden.
3. To attract nature to your garden, don’t be so tidy
Wildlife prospers in the wild. And to encourage nature into your garden, you need to make it feel unkempt.
You do not have to turn your entire garden into a jungle. You can pick a few spots to avoid mowing in that area.
You can also grow some wildflowers, making it an ideal meadowland that will welcome a wide range of insects, butterflies, and bees, which can become food for small mammals and birds.
You can even leave a tiny pile of twigs or raked leaves to offer them a safe refuge or a place to hibernate in the winter. You can also keep a pile of logs to feed insect larvae when they decay.
Be careful of only attracting nature that is good for your garden
However, it is essential to ensure that your garden attracts only the animals that benefit your garden.
While we wish to encourage butterflies, birds, bees, and other small mammals, we also want to steer clear of skunks, opossums, and raccoons.
For this, you need to ensure that your feeding areas are clean. Consider getting above and below-ground fencing that would discourage them from entering your garden.
Also, hanging wind chimes on the branches might not bother birds and will be able to keep deer away from your garden. But even after all these measures, you may still get a few visits from some unexpected guests.
4. Build a Rock Garden to attract nature
Building a rock garden can help your garden in unexpected ways.
To make a rock garden, pick a shady spot that will help you offer a habitat for different types of fungus and invertebrate species that can fight off some maleficent insects.
And it is no surprise that rock garden is effortless to maintain and also simple to create.
What nature a rock garden attracts
The rock garden attracts birds, small mammals, beetle larvae, amphibians, and even mason bees.
These specialized insects are known to be suited to more deficient and thinner soils. Moreover, they can also attract small reptiles such as skinks and other lizards.
Creatures that often love rock gardens are cold-blooded and thus require warmth to survive. And since rocks heat up in the sun, your garden offers an excellent spot for them to rest.
So, by building a rock garden, you can encourage them to visit your garden more often.
What to put in your rock garden to attract nature
You can also pile stones in the sun or near a water source to attract different species. Also, be sure that you pick rocks of different shapes and sizes.
You should maintain some gap between each rock. Once they are in situ, you can leave your rock pile and let the weeds grow around it.
5. Create a garden pond to attract nature
Ponds are one of the best ways to attract frogs, toads, and dragonflies into your garden. In the video below, I show you how to build a garden pond with a very beneficial feature that can help increase the amount of wildlife that uses your pond.
While frogs and toads will be able to complete their lifecycle in your pond, dragonflies can breed and lay eggs in underwater plants. Frogs and toads will enjoy a home, the pond, to complete their lifecycle. Dragonflies breed in water and lay their eggs in underwater plants.
A pond also provides birds a place to drink and enjoy a bath – always a wonderful sight in the garden.
Considerations for making a garden pond to attract nature
There are a few things that you should consider while building a pond in your garden. It would help if you were sure the pond has both – sun and shade areas.
Also, ensure that water plants only cover about one-third of the pond’s surface. Surround it with rocks and nectar-rich wildflowers to give it a more natural feel.
While adding fish to your pond is a great idea, you must know that they might eat up some of your wildlife.
Having a pond in your garden is not just good for the health of your garden but can also add up to its overall aesthetic value. The benefits of having one and possible considerations and disadvantages are covered in detail in this article about garden ponds being a good or bad idea. Feel free to check them out here.
However, not everyone can have the space to incorporate a pond in their garden, and we have something that you can look into to make a pond that will fit right in your garden, no matter the sizing constraints.
How to make a small pond for your garden to attract nature
One of the easiest ways to build a miniature ‘wannabe’ pond in your garden is by filling up a tire with water. Pick the desired spot for your pond, level the ground, and then fill the inside of the tire with soil.
Once you have an appropriate depth, put a layer of any waterproof material on top. You must build up the soil around the tire until it is covered. Add rocks, rocks, and even plants to camouflage the tire.
The final step is to add water. Now you can sit back and wait for the wildlife to visit your garden. While this will perfectly fulfill the purpose of a pond, building one will take a lot less space, time, effort, and money.
6. Offer an Extra Meal for nature in your garden
For kids, food is a common means of bribe. The same goes for domestic pets and even wildlife.
Giving them access to a leisurely meal can do wonders for your garden. You can put some nuts and seeds in the open. Doing so will help attract goldfinch, sparrow, blue tit, blackbirds, and robins to your garden.
We can plant to suit the needs of the birds and other wildlife that find a haven and a habitat on our home ground, and we can understand that to do so is a moral dictate, not a personal whim.
Allen Lacy, in The Inviting Garden
You can also consider putting raked leaves in a shady and damp garden corner, as this will offer habitat and food sources to various species.
You can attract toads, frogs, newts, centipedes, and even hedgehogs in your garden quite easily.
When it is best to offer food to nature and animals in your garden
Summer months are great for offering them food as they usually feed on bugs and worms that burrow deep in the soil when the ground receives direct sunlight and no rain.
Hedgehogs will also benefit if they get enough food during summer as they can better survive their winter hibernation.
Also, since hedgehogs and foxes are nocturnal animals, you should leave food for them around dusk.
Choosing the food options best for animals in your garden
You should choose moist or dry pet food when picking the right food option. Avoid getting anything fish-based for hedgehogs.
You can even offer them table scraps. Just be sure that you leave it quite far from your house.
Conclusion on how to attract nature in our garden
Building a wildlife garden can be a magical experience.
You will be startled to witness frogs returning to your pond, worms basking in the sun, swarms of bees hovering over the wildflowers, birds enjoying a bath, and newts relishing their breeding spot.
These day-to-day sights are as fascinating as witnessing a rare species for the first time. And while it is true that the more habitats you have, the better diversity of invertebrates you will attract, you must never overdo it and risk infestations.
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